Connolly cherished no illusions about the land "reform." He showed up the fact that the mass of the peasantry was still steeped in misery and that the necessity for joint struggle with the workers still existed, was even still greater than hitherto. The opponent and exploiter had only changed his shape. Formerly that shape was that of a feudal capitalist landlord and now the peasantry was faced with trade and bank capital and the collector of the British government.
Connolly wrote on the effects of the reforms on the land question:
"But that question so dreaded rises again; it will not lie down, and cannot be suppressed. The partial success of the Land League has effected a change in Ireland, the portent of which but few realize. Stated briefly, it means that the recent Land Acts, acting contemporaneously with the development of trans-Atlantic traffic, are converting Ireland into a country governed according to the conception of feudalism into a country shaping itself after capitalist laws of trade. That war which the Land League fought, and then abandoned, before it was either lost or won, will be taken up by the Irish toilers on a broader field with sharper weapons, and a more comprehensive knowledge of all the essentials of permanent victory. As the Irish septs of the past were accounted Irish or English according as they rejected or accepted the native or foreign social order, as they measured their oppression or freedom by their loss or recovery of the collective ownership of their lands, so the Irish toilers from henceforward will base their fight for freedom not upon the winning or losing the right to talk in an Irish Parliament, but upon their progress towards the mastery of those factories, workshops, and farms upon which a people's bread and liberties depend."
The correctness of this analysis was proved by the role which the peasants played in the civil war, 1919–1921,
18
